This is the first volume of the long awaited new edition of the Petrie
papyri, which were found in mummy cartonnage in a cemetery on the fringe
of the Fayum and first published in the last decade of the 19th century.
Hundreds of Greek and demotic papyri will be reedited with many
additions to the editio princeps (which did not include the numerous
fragments) and an up-to-date commentary. The present volume contains the
remains of a register of Ptolemaic wills, dated between 238 and 226
B.C., and now housed in London, Dublin, Oxford and Jena. The more than
fifty wills, some of them very fragmentary, are a prime source of
information for Greek law of inheritance (with striking parallels in the
wills of Plato and Aristotle), for the organisation of the Ptolemaic
army (most wills are drawn up for soldiers in order to safeguard their
military possessions), for women's rights (apparently the wife did not
enjoy legal protection and had to be provided for by means of a will),
for personal descriptions in official documents, for slavery and for the
presence of Greeks and Alexandrians in the Egyptian interior in the
third century B.C.
- ISBN13 9789065694515
- Publish Date 1 January 1991
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country BE
- Imprint Kon Acad Wetenschappen Letteren
- Format Paperback
- Pages 266
- Language English